The Morning Gift

The lady with the poodle entered, disappointing Mrs Weiss, with her bulging horsehair purse, who had hoped it was someone for whom she could buy a cake and tell about her daughter-in-law who that morning had forced open her bedroom window with some rubbish about rooms needing to be aired. Mrs Weiss had never allowed wet air into a room in which she slept and had told Moira so, and Georg (now called George) who should have taken his mother’s part, had slunk off to the garage and gone to work.

At the table by the hat stand the banker and his wife from Hamburg sat in silence, each reading a magazine. In Germany they had been a successful and well-established ménage à trois, but Lisa’s lover, a racially pure car salesman, had stayed behind and though he tried to take his place, the banker knew that he was failing. The walls of their small room were thin, the bed narrow – and afterwards, always, she sighed.

Then Leonie entered the café – and the sadness that was in all of them found a focus. There was no need to ask if there was any news. This was a Demeter who had given up all hope of rescuing her daughter from the Underworld. Ruth, like Persephone, was lost, and in the streets of North-West London, winter had come.

Supported by her husband and uncle, Leonie reached her table and sat down, but no one today did more than nod a greeting. Even a smile seemed intrusive.

In the kitchen, Miss Violet fetched the cake knife, Miss Maud cut a wedge from the virgin Guglhupf, Mrs Burtt fetched a plate – and the procession set off.

‘With the compliments of the management,’ said Miss Maud, setting the plate down in front of Leonie.

Leonie looked and understood. She took in the sacrifice of principle, the honour they did her. Then she breathed once deeply, like a swimmer about to go under. Her face crumpled, her shoulders sagged – and she burst into the most dreadful and heart rending sobs. It was weeping made incarnate: once begun it was impossible to stop. Professor Berger took her hand, but for the first time in her life, she pushed him away. She wanted to rid herself of tears and die.

In the café, no one else made a sound. Dr Levy did not offer professional help; von Hofmann, usually so gallant, did not proffer his handkerchief. And Miss Maud and Miss Violet looked at each other, horrified by what they had done.

Then suddenly Paul Ziller, at a table by the window, pushed back his chair.

‘Oh dear!’ said Miss Maud.

It was a mild remark, coming from the daughter of a general, for the damage was considerable. The coffee pot on the Bergers’ table knocked over, staining the cloth, three willow-pattern plates broken . . . Mrs Berger’s chair, as she pushed it back, had fallen on to Dr Levy’s scrambled eggs. Nor had the poodle found it possible to remain uninvolved. Barking furiously, he had collided with the hat stand which had keeled over, missing the pottery cat but not the bowl of potpourri on the windowsill, nor the pretty blue and white ashtray the ladies had brought from Gloucestershire.

In the middle of the wreckage stood Leonie, holding her daughter in her arms. Except that this wasn’t holding it was fusion. The tears she still shed were Ruth’s tears also; no human agency could have separated those two figures. Even for her husband, Leonie could not relinquish Ruth . . . could only draw him closer with a briefly freed hand. There had been joy in the moment of marriage, joy in childbirth – but this was a joy like no other in the world.

Uncle Mishak was the first member of the family to notice the devastation: Miss Violet dabbing at the tables, Miss Maud picking up pieces of crockery, Mrs Burtt on her knees. To add to the chaos, Aunt Hilda, who had leapt from her bed after redirecting Ruth to the café, had fallen over the bucket into which the ladies were wringing their cloths.

‘I am so sorry,’ said Leonie, emerging, and did indeed try hard to embrace the concept of sorryness and to calculate the damage.

It was now that Mrs Weiss rose. Her raddled face was bathed in an unaccustomed dignity, her voice was firm.

‘I will pay!’ she announced. ‘I will pay for every-think.’

And she did pay. The ladies accepted her offer; everyone understood that the old lady had to be part of what was happening. Pound notes and half-crowns, shillings and sixpences tumbled out of the dreadful purse made of the scalped hair of East Prussian horses. She paid not for one coffee pot, but for two: not for three willow-pattern plates, but six. For the first time since she had come to England, the purse bulging with her daughter-in-law’s conscience money was empty; the clasp clicked together without catching on the unshed largesse. It was Mrs Weiss’s finest hour and not one person in the Willow Tea Rooms grudged it to her.

‘So!’ said Leonie, some twenty minutes later. ‘Now tell us. How did you get here? How did you come?’